Video Game / Travian

Travian is a German massively multiplayer online Real-Time Strategy game set in classical antiquity, released in 2004. Players choose one of three "tribes" (Romans, Gauls, and Teutons), later five in some servers (Huns, Egyptians), to settle and wage war over every new map until one group succeeds in finishing a World Wonder in defiance of the NPC tribe, the Natars, and their player enemies.

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Travian contains examples of:

• Action Initiative: Travian uses a time system where all actions are counted by the second - multiple actions completed within that second would be considered to be executed at the exact same time. If multiple sets of troops are to arrive at the same second, the priority is based on the time when they were sent, with those being sent earlier considered first, even if they arrive on the exact same second. ^note This is tactically important, such as if you are attacked by a main force too large for you to repel, followed by waves of smaller attacks with catapults. If you see a main attack at 00:00:01 and a follow up at 00:00:02, since they have already been sent, your reinforcements need to arrive at 00:00:01 exactly to block the follow up.
• Adaptation Name Change: The artifacts have very simple, descriptive names in the original German. The English version is more elaborate, and up to eleven in the Chinese version. For example, "Better scouts" to "The eagles great eyes" to "Thousand-mile eyes of the divine eagle"^note the Chinese version also changes the name completely depending on tier, with the lower tier being "The observation of seagull" and the higher being "Heavenly eyes of the phoenix", or "Unique builder" to "The architects unique secret" to "The old artisan's golden dragon hammer".
  • In the Chinese version, "Huns" are translated as Xiongnu (匈奴). ^note Likely done because they are another ancient group of people more familiar to Chinese audiences. The real-life relation between the Huns and Xiongnu is controversial and complicated academic subject. Incidentally, the Huns in Mulan is also Xiongnu in Chinese.
• Allegedly Free Game: An infamous example. It is often argued to even be a semi-relevant player, you need to pay a lot to buy gold.
• Anachronism Stew: Mildly. The game could conceivably take place in a historical setting shortly before 343 BC (Persian conquest of Egypt) when Romans, Gauls, Teutons, and Egyptians all operated independently until the rest are all eventually conquered by the Roman Empire. The problem is the Huns, which are only active from the 4th to 6th centuries AD.^note If you are looking for other potential tribes in the previous time period, highly developed civilisations that could be candidates include the Zhou dynasty in ancient China, the Kingdom of Kush in what is today Sudan (which was incidentally in conflict with Egypt until both were eventually conquered by Alexander the Great), the First Persian Empire centred around modern Iran, Macedonians in Greece, the Maya civilisation in Mesoamerica, Lihyan in what is today Saudi Arabia, and more. Also, the Gauls are only one of the many Celtic peoples, a group that includes Celtic Britons that lived in roughly today's England. And no, the Vikings sadly come centuries later after the Huns.
  • The Egyptians' Khopesh Warrior. In real life, the khopesh fell out of use about 1000 years ago.
• Ancient Egypt: The Egyptian tribe is obviously based on it, however loosely. Four of their units are named after gods in Egyptian Mythology (Ash Warden, Anhur Guard, Sopdu Explorer, and Resheph Chariot) but interestingly none of the well-known ones.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: The Huns has arguably the best offensive tribe with almost no defence troops and their wall takes hits like paper. They can also build Command Centers in every village instead of Palace/Residence, which gives 3 expansion slots each like Palaces, encouraging them to conquer.
• Automaton Horses: Surprisingly averted despite the game's simplicity on them. Horses consume additional crop, and Romans can build the Horse Drinking Trough that reduces crop consumption and training time. Oddly, despite being depicted in horse-drawn carriages, Settlers are considered infantry. They eat 1 crop each, and Huns Settlers (which have 10 attack versus 0 for other tribes) are considered infantry when attacking.
• Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: A bit hard to see due to the helmet, but the Roman icon has dark hair, the Gaul is a redhead, and the Teuton is blonde. This extends somewhat to the troops, but not always.
• Booze-Based Buff: Teuton's Brewery increases troops' Attack by up to 20% at the cost of halving Chief effectiveness and randomising catapult targets.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: To an extreme degree. It is commonplace for top players to throw thousands of dollars each into one round, which only lasts months before it is wiped clean.
• Cannon Fodder: The Egyptian Slave Militia is the cheapest unit in the game and has the lowest stats (other than spy units). However, they consume 1 crop per hour, same as any infantry, so they tend not to be kept around for long.
  • The Hun's Mercenary is a less extreme and more popular case, having decent offence and defence but also trained quickly.
  • The Teuton's Clubswinger also has decent attack at low cost, but has the lowest defence of any non-scout unit in the game.
• Crippling Overspecialization: The Gauls' Haeduan has the highest cavalry defence in the game, but very poor infantry defence and mediocre offence. ^note Their offense used to be decent, at 140 for 3 crop consumption. However, the introduction of the Horse Drinking Trough for Romans reduces the crop consumption of Equites Caesaris (180 attack) to 3, and the brewery increased Teutonic Knight's effective attack to 180, making Haeduan weaker in comparison. It still has some niche uses as a fast anti-cavalry defender, like in quick reinforcements where most of the defenders would be anti-infantry (Druidrider, Anhur Guard).
• Doing In the Wizard: Theutates Thunder used to have an actual lightning bolt as a weapon. This was later changed to a a mundane spear, then a bow. The Druidrider's design is also changed to be less obviously wizard-y.
• Early Game Hell: You have very little resource generation, and once your few days of beginner's protection wears off, you can be attacked at any time by a raiding player with far larger armies and deeper pockets. In most cases, your only hope to play the game in relative safety is managing to join a strong alliance. Updates has attempted to alleviate this, with a task system that rewards you with a lot of resources that are kept in the hero's inventory and cannot be stolen until you transfer it to a village.
• Easy Logistics: Troops eat crop from whatever village they are assigned to, even if they are currently en route. You can always get from point A to point B as easily, regardless of whatever is in between. However, even though it is greatly simplified from real life, crop supply is still a challenge in the game and why 15c squares (plots with 15 croppers and only 1 of each of the other resources) are so sought after. Being able to instantly exchange resources or set up trade routes to automatically send resources are paid features for a reason.
• Empty Levels: Most building offer a significant increase in effectiveness at every level up. Exceptions include the Treasury and Embassy, which only unlocks new abilities at 3 or less occasions. ^note Embassy unlocks joining alliances at level 1 and starting an alliance at level 3, and nothing afterwards (it used to give +3 max player count in an alliance for each level), but because it is cheap and gives very high culture points, it is commonly built to 20 by experienced players. Palace and Residence are almost this, except they do increase the rate loyalty recovers depending on their level.
• Flat World: Subverted. The map looks flat with every potential village/oasis/wilderness being a square. The "large" game world looks like a 800x800 square (-400 to 400 east to west, and south to north), with each quadrant colloquially referred to as southeast, southwest, northwest, and northeast. However, gameplay wise, it is considered a spherical world. ‭‭−‭400‬‬|-‭400‬, −‭400‬‬|‭400‬, −400‬‬|‭-400‬, and 400‬‬|‭400‬ are all right next to each other.
• Glass Cannon: The Steppe Rider is the most offense-biased unit in the game, at 120/30/15. Combine with the Bowman for a very cheap and strong offense attacking force, at the cost of getting absolutely annihilated by any cavalry attack.
  • In another way, catapults. If they are allowed to hit buildings and resource fields, they are incredibly devastating. However, they all have only 10 cavalry defence and are very expensive.
• Guide Dang It!: Many more advanced elements of the game are not mentioned in the tutorial, such as troop movement priorities (see Action Initiative above).
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Helmets are important and useful, but they do not display in the small portrait that is always present in the top left corner.
• Hero Unit: You used to need to build a Hero's Mansion to train a hero out of a regular military unit; you can have multiple but only one can be active at once. Their only abilities are their high stats (based on what military unit they are), offensive/defensive bonuses for accompanying troops, and conquering oases. In T4, a unique hero is given to the player at game start and they have a variety of abilities, equipment, and items in their inventory they can use. Their importance is elevated to nearly player character level.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: The "specials", servers that are played different from the default are usually named like "Travian: Tides of Conquest", other than the New Year specials. However, confusing things are the names "Travian: Legends" (which has a broader scope, it is the current Travian 4 version of the game, all running servers are under this banner), and "Travian: Kingdoms", which is an entirely separate game with a similar setting.
• I'm a Humanitarian: If a village runs out of crop because there are too many troops, they will start to die off and whenever a unit dies, it is turned into the amount of crop used to train it, which is sometimes referred to as cannibalism by players.
• Instant-Win Condition: There are multiple game modes, but the classic one is "Wonder of the World", where you win when you build it to level 100, although building it takes at least 13 days.
• Jack of All Stats: The Romans' Legionnaire and the Huns' Mercenary. While the former has higher stats for the same crop consumption, the latter is more often used due to their short training time and low cost.
• Level-Up Fill-Up: Levelling up the hero fully restores their health. Since natural recovery is slow, in early game it is crucial to manage this well unless you're buying a ton of ointments. In late game, mission rewards are plentiful and any large battle the hero survives would almost always level them up, so ointments become less important.
• Lightning Bruiser: Huns' Marksmen is the second fastest regular combat unit (tied fastest if accompanied by hero) with the second highest capacity, gives marginally less attack per crop than the top cavalry attackers (57.5 instead of 60), and quite high defence as well.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • Normally, you cannot reinforce, sent resources to, or be the sitter of someone who is not in your confederacy. ^note This can be circumvented by temporarily changing alliances. For sitters, if both accounts were originally from the same confederacy before one moves out, the other can sill be a sitter for the former so long as the latter does not log out on their browser.
• Magikarp Power: The Romans are clearly intended to be this, with the most expensive but crop efficient troops in the game, but the fast-paced, high loss gameplay limits their ability somewhat. However, they are still sometimes use to build end-game "nukes", a single all-out Suicide Attack, where the high costs and losses matter less.
• Misplaced Wildlife: Most Crocodiles are correctly placed around bodies of water (crop oases), but in rare occasions they are found in mountains (iron oases).
• More Diverse Sequel: Travian: Fire and Sand introduces the Huns and the Egyptians.
• Moveset Clone: Almost all special units (scouts, chiefs, settlers, siege machines) are similar to each other, but otherwise, the Egyptians' Anhur Guard is very similar to the Gauls' Druidrider, with the exact same resource costs and training time, marginally higher attack and lower defence, 1 lower speed, and higher carrying capacity.
• Nerf:
  • The Huns' Steppe Rider is such a superior raider and surprise attacker, their carrying capacity had to be nerfed from 115 to 75.
  • In Travian: Tides of Conquest, Egyptian's Waterworks (which gives a massive buff to oasis production) can only be built in Cities, which has its own requirement and limitations.
  • New servers from the beginning of 2022 has the Marksman's attack and speed reduced, Stone Wall's ram resistance reduced, and Ash Warden's training time increased.
• Never Smile at a Crocodile: The Crocodile unit is the second strongest in the game after the Elephant, and is the strongest per crop upkeep. While captured animals don't eat crop, animals killed in oases yield 50 of each resource per upkeep, making the Crocodile the toughest and least appealing opponent in oases. Additionally, they are a lot more common than Elephants and up to 40 of them (possibly more) can spawn in a single oasis while Elephants are normally limited to single digits.
• Not the Intended Use:
  • You can attack a friendly village in order to move their resources to you. This is more efficient than merchants especially in the late game as you are limited to 20 merchants per village but troops are unlimited.
  • Gauls' traps in a village. ^note Each trap captures one invading unit without further harming them, the idea being that it either fully captures raiding groups or cut down their numbers so the rest can be defeated more easily. However, the traps of a friendly Gaul player can be used to safely store valuable units (Settlers, Administrators) since the units can be kept in a trap until the Gaul player releases them or they are forcibly released by a normal attack on the Gaul village.
  • Auctions are important to buy equipment you need, but players also buy unpopular equipment for the cheap to get better equipment from adventures (since you cannot get something you already have from an adventure).
  • Teutons are designated as the attacker's tribe, but their Spearman allows them to be good defenders as well. ^note They have 95 total defence, which is the second highest per crop in the game, only after the Praetorian at 100, tied with the Ash Warden, but the Spearman is much cheaper than both of them. The Praetorian only has a speed of 5 (6 for Ash Warden) while Spearman has 7, among the fastest for infantry other than the Scout. They are also the second cheapest unit per defence point and second fastest defence per training time, only narrowly beaten by the Phalanx in both regards.
• Patriotic Fervor: Not helped by the addition of the public "Language" setting, which allows you to display up to 4 out of 48 real-life flags. Alliances in international servers are usually usually built upon players of a real-life nation, and accusations of underhanded behaviour is often flung against "enemy" nations. Incidentally the American flag was the default even though there is a UN flag for "English (International)", until the default became the latter in 2021.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: The Natarian Axerider's horse has red eyes and it is the strongest cavalry in game in terms of attack per crop.
• Resurrection Gambit: You can consume a bucket to resurrect your hero instantly, in any of your villages. This essentially allows you to teleport your hero to any of your villages as long as you have a way to get them killed quickly, instead of having to spend time to travel the distance.
• Skill Gate Characters: Gauls are officially recommended for new players. Their unique building, Trapper, and their 50% larger Crannies help protect newbies in the early game, but are largely useless late game. Gauls are mostly defensive, but even there, their Phalanx is worse at defence per crop than other tribes' staple defensive infantry, other than Huns. One advantage Gauls had was Theutates Thunder, a lightning-fast raider but it has been outclassed by the release of the Huns. Both Steppe Riders and Marksmen are cheaper to train, move nearly as fast, and have much higher attack with the same crop consumption. Marksmen also have much higher defence and carrying capacity. Druidrider is still overall the best defending cavalry however; they are only beaten by the Resheph Chariot in defence per crop, but the latter is much slower.
• Stone Wall: The Egyptians are the most defensive tribe with the weakest offense. Appropriately, their wall is the "Stone Wall", which both offers a high defensive bonus and is difficult to destroy.
  • The Roman Praetorian, which has the single highest defence per crop in the game, but they have mediocre offence and the lowest speed out of all regular infantry.
• Volcano Lair: The main village of the Natars (0|0) is on a volcano as seen in the map, although this does not affect gameplay.
• War Elephants: The aptly named War Elephant unit, the strongest of the Natars. It also count as a ram, and its sky-high attack stat makes it far more effective at destroying walls than player tribes. Ironically, the wild Elephant, the Nature troop, has even higher stats (600/440/520) although Nature troops can only defend.